Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [20]
Dorn and Cooper step from the elevator onto the mezzanine level and walk down the flight of stairs into the swamp of card tables. The section of the casino where The Brethren always sit is a small room off the main poker floor where, beyond a blue rope, there is a single table. While strictly overseen by the eye in the sky, the hand-dealt games here have the dangerous air of an old faro game. No one is fully safe with the human element, but they have all been warned. Dorn, in a canary-yellow Hawaiian shirt, sips a glass of scotch and watches The Brethren hunting down a civilian. Autry gestures a welcome into their game. Dorn and Cooper hesitate. This is expected of them; normally they are gun-shy with the Born-Agains. They mime having another drink and signal a possible return, then continue their walk around the casino. An hour later, when they do eventually step over the blue rope and sit down with Autry and the two thieves, one on either side of him, it’s quickly established that this will be a private game, there will be no house dealer. And it’s Texas Hold ‘Em. This is how The Brethren play.
In the first hand Dorn wins a thousand. It’s the expected hook from The Brethren, and Dorn shows modesty. He leans forward with his long unwashed hair and his big smile. Autry begins a monologue about the state of the world, this desert, that troublesome desert. The hands go back and forth for more than an hour, the good hands essentially cancelling each other out, a familiar rise and fall. Whenever it is Coop’s turn, he cuts the deck faithfully. The players are all watching the movement of hands, the buried habits. Coop notices where the player on his right habitually cuts the cards, roughly the same spot every time. The talk around the table is constant, interesting anecdote and data, but Cooper thinks of the wheel. He knows someone will make a move soon. ‘Don’t riffle-stack for just a minor haul,’ Mancini has told him. ‘Save the work for when everything has escalated.’ So Cooper waits.
The plan is for him at some point to double-duke, creating two great hands during the course of the shuffles—one for Autry and a better one for himself. He will place this riffle-stacked slug of cards beneath a crimp, about where the player on his right usually cuts the cards. If the man cuts at the crimp, there will be no need for Coop to hop or shift the deck secretly; they will be able to bet everything on the known fall of the cards. Whenever he is ready to do this he will signal Dorn to provide shade so there will be some distraction.
The game began in mid-afternoon, and it is now seven. Autry’s right-hand thief continues dealing Texas Hold ‘Em. Shortly after this, Dorn suggests raising the blinds to make the game twice as big. There will be two hands before Cooper gets to deal again. He and Dorn have won and lost hands but have scraped through. A real assault against them has not yet taken place.
Dorn now describes some news footage he has watched of the massacre in the ‘troublesome desert’—with American planes pouring down ten thousand rounds a minute onto a crowded highway of escaping soldiers. ‘That’s the news, as of yesterday,’ he mutters. ‘We’re dropping five-hundred-pound antitank cluster bombs that spew out razor shards into the air at four thousand feet per second. We’re burning up those bodies from a biblical height. The highway, they say, is like Daytona Beach during spring break.’ ‘Stop it!’ Autry explodes, but Dorn doesn’t. ‘It’s Resurrection Day.... Everything there, they say, is more or less charcoal.’ Cooper completes his shuffle sequence and slips in the slug, low in the deck. A silence round the table. Dorn gives more details of the attack on the Republican Guard, until Autry puts his hand up and requests silence. Cooper takes back the deck, showing rapt attention as Autry remembers a conversion he witnessed in which a girl of six began speaking whole pages out of the Old Testament.
Cooper deals out the first round of cards—two face-down to each player. This goes on the table:
Cooper asks Autry to continue his